So I’m assuming that you are someone who lives in a high property tax state where the SALT cap affected you then? For most people however, their taxes went down AND the amount of their deductions went up.

that’s great that taxes went down for some population. They also increased for others. Pretending that doesn’t matter because “oh you just live in the wrong place” is foolish

Except I didn’t say that. If you have more than 10k in SALT deductions, you may have lower deductions overall, but that’s not most people. And the degree to which it was offset by paying lower income taxes, again for most people, was a tax win.

the standard deduction went up but a ton of itemized deductions went away. Union dues, per diem difference, as well as most charitable donations off the top of my head. Personally I went from around 45k in deductions to 24k married filing jointly. 12k per person. Even taking out SALT my taxes went up because I still would have been over 24k in deductions. I’m really not complaining that’s just what happened.

Yep, sounds like you lost out. Personally, my income is so irregular that it’s hard to compare the income tax burden YOY, although by the tables I would be paying less at the same income. On the deductions side it has been better as my state has extremely low property and relatively low income taxes, hence the constant influx of New-Englander retirees.

I recognize it did help most sub 6 figure households (majority of middle class) and didn’t make a huge difference so I’m fine with it.

Correction- it made a nominal difference to most middle-income Americans. Some for the better, some for the worse. Those who did benefit will see those benefits expire in around 4 years. It was all a shell game on the middle class to distract from the massive corporate tax cuts the bill was actually designed around. R’s aren’t lying when they say they’re the party of lower taxes- it’s just not you’re taxes they’re talking about.

And no, none of you guys are rich in the context of this discussion.

Is this the part where we put our heads in the sand and pretend that corporate taxes aren’t another way to tax the middle class?

“Informed by our empirical estimate, we can gauge the incidence of corporate taxes on consumers by relating the welfare change of consumers induced by a marginal change in the net‐​of‐​tax rate to the sum of the welfare changes of consumers, workers, and firm owners. We find that the incidence on consumers, workers, and shareholders is 31 percent, 38 percent, and 31 percent, respectively. This stands in sharp contrast to the case where we do not take into account the effect of corporate income tax on product prices; under this assumption, workers and shareholders will bear 42 percent and 58 percent of the tax burden, respectively.”

The lion’s share of consumers, workers, and shareholders are composed of the middle class. Taxing corporations is good politics, but bad policy - unless you want more revenue from your largest income group (the middle class).

Corporate Taxes and Retail Prices

^^^^^ this

Understood. I was leaving that part out for the sake of discussing our (upper middle class) effective tax burden. When discussing corporate tax rates there’s several arguments on both sides with merit. corporations employ workers who pay tax, write offs, depreciation, deferred tax, ect…. It’s endless.

You remember why it was only valid until 2025, though, correct? It will sound very familiar. It was a result of having to use reconciliation to pass the bill. Such is the way of our government nowadays. The same will likely be true of any legislation for the foreseeable future until a party has a supermajority in Congress.

I'd have to get deeper in the weeds to investigate that claim. The corporate taxes do not expire, so at its face, the idea that reconciliation barred permanent changes seems like misdirection- which the PR job on this bill had plenty of.

The individual tax cuts were scheduled to phase out right after what would have been the end of Trump’s second term. It was widely seen at the time to be a thinly veiled attempt to keep the middle class placated while locking in permanent corporate tax cuts. The corporate rate was Paul Ryan’s baby, and I don’t doubt he would have preferred to leave individual taxes right where they were; but to get Trump on board, he had to give him something that allowed him to claim victory for the common man. What they gave him was a smoke & mirrors tax “cut” for the middle class that would expire shortly after he would leave office (considering 2 terms)- making it the next POTUS’ mess to clean up.

This is a pretty complex discussion, but you have to understand a couple of points.

1. Corporations are hard to tax. “Tax the rich” sounds good, but actually getting the money requires well written policy & the closing of lots of loopholes. Politicians who are coziest with corporate lobbies will tell you it simply can’t be done- that corporations will just restructure their business to evade taxes. In my opinion that’s a self-serving half truth. Yes, individuals and corporations will typically take reasonable action to minimize their tax burden, but that doesn’t mean significant change in aggregate is completely impossible.

2. The relationship between corporate taxes & burden on the consumer works most directly as it goes up. IOW, corporate tax raises get passed on to the consumer- but corporate cuts don’t result in big givebacks. The years following the Trump cuts generally supported this. The bill was supposed to pay for itself through economic growth & an improved labor market. Even before COVID it failed to do this. Most corporations simply pocketed the money & gave executive bonuses.

I work for a huge corporation so obviously I’m not anti-business, but the “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” explanation is overly simplistic in my opinion. Yes you can squeeze corporations so hard that they find ways to move their business elsewhere; and that hurts the little guy, too. But if someone isn’t holding their feet to the fire, they will find a way to hoard ever increasing amounts of wealth at the executive level.

Reconciliation is only subject to budgetary constraints within a 10 year period, so it doesn’t limit temporary/permanent measures per se, but the net losses from personal income taxes were not offset by the positive effect of flattening the corporate tax rate along with the laundry list of de-globalization measures. Could they have made it 22% and extended the personal income tax cuts by a year to make the net effect the same? Maybe, but I’m assuming that the economists calculating these numbers determined that raising it more would have dulled the effect of the move to the territorial tax system and that 21% was somehow an optimal number.

Which is kind of my point. The bill was calculated prioritizing a corporate tax break, then adding in the minimum possible illusion of a personal tax break as an afterthought. It was scheduled to revert to normal once people had forgotten about the particulars of the bill required nothing of corporations- just a Pollyanish belief that they would necessarily pump a ton of money back into the US economy & the labor market, which never happened. Eventually, when the promised economic growth failed to justify the reduced tax revenue, they would have to come back to us & start saying “we simply can’t afford to pay for X”, which is exactly what’s happening today. They’re conveniently leaving out the part that the reason we can’t afford infrastructure spending is that they spent the last few years increasing government spending while reducing revenue. It’s a long con that squeezes the middle class to benefit the ultra-wealthy.

1. Cut corporate & personal taxes
2. Complain that there’s not enough money
3. Raise personal taxes
4. Complain that there’s not enough money
5. Cut government benefits to individuals.
6. Complain about a stagnating economy & suggest a corporate tax reduction to stimulate growth.
7. Repeat

The flip side of the coin is that heavily taxing and penalizing corporations (i.e. employers) is that decisions are made focusing on reducing the tax burden rather than expansion, which further squeezes employees and encourages employers to relocate to more tax friendly locations.

Your point is that because of democrats, they had to pass the bill under reconciliation and because of that they couldn’t be permanent?

Well, then we agree.

To the first part yes, to the second, no. Reconciliation did not prevent them from making permanent changes as evidenced by the fact that there is no expiration date to the corporate tax break. They chose to make the corporate breaks permanent & the individual cuts temporary.

Of course. No one’s saying that’s not the case. But it’s as naive to say corporate tax breaks necessarily benefit employees as it is to say there’s no breaking point to how high you can effectively tax corporations. You have to tie tax breaks to employee benefits- minimum wages, work rules, paid leave, union protections, etc.- in order to ensure the trickle down effect. One of the reasons American pensions were once so robust is that they were funded with excess profits that would otherwise have gone straight into taxes. The corporations figured they couldn’t keep the money, so why not dump it into employee benefits that would maintain a happy & productive work force rather than just hand it over to the feds? Once the tax structure was changed to allow them to keep more of that money among their executives rather than giving it up to their employees, they very unsurprisingly did just that.

The US economy relies on corporations as well as workers & consumers, yet we only seem to consider that balance in one direction. We always talk about how keeping corporations happy will provide an indirect benefit to the working class, but never about how maintaining a thriving working class is a benefit to corporations. I wonder why that is?

You’re misunderstanding it then. The flattening (not reduction in all cases) of the corporate tax rate along with the restructuring to a territorial as opposed to global tax basis for multinational entities was a net economic POSITIVE. There is no reason to limit the duration of a positive gain. The only way under the terms of reconciliation to have it balance tax cuts to personal taxes (NET NEGATIVE) would be to limit their duration. Whether or not those gains from the corporate structure play out in permanence isn’t a factor to passing a bill. The CBO estimates of the effect that it has are all that matters at that time.

I tend to agree with what you’ve outlined here. That bill was part of a larger plan to bring manufacturing and other jobs back to our country. That’s the real problem because to me jobs never left due to tax rates. Jobs left in search of cheap labor, no requirement to pay unemployment/health insurance and other costs. That has to be magnitudes more savings than a few % tax that can be deferred/written off/depreciated or any other method available to reduce it. The Democrats need to echo this as part of thier government opinion health coverage imo. The employer paid health insurance requirements are a major disadvantage to USA employers.

Reopened- apologies to those in the conversation.

It's a tax policy debate that seemed headed for political fighting imo, but it's stayed pretty civil.

Agreed. Most of this bill was certainly not infrastructure as we traditionally defined it. It has long term entitlements that will be nearly impossible to end, and will drag us further into debt for decades. And oh by the way I’d like to continue investing post tax money into my 401k, and I’m not a billionaire…

NOW we worry about debt/deficit. :rolleyes: After the last administration inherited a 500B annual deficit, increased it every year with a big dumb tax cut, culminating with the largest budget deficit EVER. A 3.1T annual deficit in 2020!! DOUBLING any deficit of his predecessor, who actually decreased the deficit over his 2 terms by over half.

https://www.thebalance.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306

i presume most people want the government to slow their roll no matter who is in charge. The thought that past precedent dictates future action is silly. The government spending is out of control and is unsustainable. They want to talk about the full faith and credit of the US, but who is going to pay for the full faith. We will go bankrupt, it is inevitable. The only real question is will it be in our children’s lifetime or ours.

I’d say the opposite appears true. In general, people are more committed to their team than to their political convictions. There are very few people who actually care about debt without regard to who is doing the spending. Most are happy to let their side run up the bill then start complaining about it in 4-8 years when the other side does the same thing. It’s not a sustainable practice, but it does happen to be a very reliable pattern.

This, exactly.

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Every single year Donald Trump was president the US had higher tax revenue then every year Barack Obama was. 2021 will be the highest tax revenue year in the history of the US, even with unemployment and supply issues… We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a massive spending problem, and yes - it’s absolutely a bipartisan problem. It’s like Captains that make $300k a year, but still sleep in the crew room because they don’t have the cash to ”waste” on a $100 hotel.

https://www.thebalance.com/current-u...evenue-3305762

And every single year from 2011 thru 2015 the Obama budget deficit decreased from 1.3T to 438B. With 5-10% annual increases in tax revenue AND spending cuts. Trump's big stupid tax cut increased revenue less than 1% a year, yet he signed budget bills increasing spending 10% annually. That's likely how he bankrupted his casinos and airline. We threw him out before he bankrupted America.... There is a term for guys like Trump..... luckily not two though. One and done.... like Carter.

Budget deficit by year.....
2015 438B
2016 585B
2017 665B
2018 779B
2019 984B
2020 3.1 tttttt Trillion

Mmmm-k, so we both agree that we have a spending problem… and not so much a revenue problem.

Ours…of course.

We care about other things besides money and the stock market. It seems you worship at the altar of the almighty dollar. The left is beyond saving.

I realize it is a moving target, but has anyone seen any current language of the latest proposal?

I haven’t, I was going to ask the same thing. Guessing that if spending is curtailed then taxing will also come down, unknown where that will come from though.

My thoughts too. I’m sure it will be public at the vey last second.

Do I vote my paycheck? You bet your ascot I do. What am I supposed to do? Go in for the gays, guns, immigrants, and abortion platform? I could give 2 sheets. In this union airline business, voting Dem for president has brought the big contracts, and big prosperity. At least in the last 30 years it has. YMMV.

You’re trying to reason with someone that believes the party of the US President determines how good the next contract will be. Probably not a wise use of your time.